Archive for the ‘House’ Category

Garcias’ House is located on a 273 square meter lot in a fast growing residential area of Cancun. The lot is adjacent in its northern and western sides with other residential lots, while it faces greenery to the east and the street to the south. The strategy for this project was to limit the habitable volume on the western side, in order to make the most of the view, the shadow and incorporate the public greenery with the interior of the house, thru the empty space between them.

For those people who have a long experience of living in single-unit houses with a courtyard, it is a great challenge to change their life style and live in apartment houses.

Losing many of desirable advantages of single unit houses such as independency, fellowship with nature, existence of hierarchy and, natural ventilation and … is a trouble for the people who want to live apartment units.

Putting together two small penthouses duplex gave us the opportunity to reorganize and treat the resulting space as a non-urban single family house.

This way it’s divided into a floor for night programme and another one for common day areas. These include an exterior prolongation in a terrace, treated as a garden to enhance the “single family house” sensation despite being in the city. Wood is used on floors, walls and ceilings as a natural material from rural houses.

We received a commission from a married couple to design a house to be built on a small plot (with an 8-meter frontage and a depth of 30 meters) inserted within a dense and difficult context. The couple, whose children had already left home, asked us for a simple house, obstruction-free and with a strongly contemporary feel.

Everyone loved the classic, original bones of this house, but it was in need of a major facelift both inside and out. The owners also wanted to remove the barriers between the kitchen and great room, and increase the size of the master bathroom as well as make other layout changes. No addition to the house was contemplated.

The project started with an unconventional request from an open minded couple: within a very tight budget, to convert a windowless 200m2 garage into a house. The proposed intervention intended the clearest reading possible of the existing structure, emphasising its strength. While the garage was careless and grey, the house is clean and white; its materiality is flat, its light is abstract. Two generous bathrooms were included behind a curved wall, where a broken corner was before; the walls and ceilings were painted in white and the floor covered in a continuous polished concrete surface; the existing skylights we’re rethought. No other change felt necessary. Carefully placed elements organize the living areas: a marble kitchen, curtains, potted plants. Along with the furniture, the free standing elements carry the flexible identity of the house, hinting its domesticity while punctuating the abstract volume with color.

Casa Invisibile is a flexible housing unit, which consists of a prefabricated wood structure designed for turnkey implementation at any designated site. Maximum flexibility and spatial quality are the key elements in its concept of development. The open layout is structured by a chimney and a wet cell creating three spatial units that provide for individual use and design. The structure and ambience of the rooms are characterised by the use of domestic woods. The mounting framework and fitments of the housing unit are exclusively assembled from prefabricated elements at the factory. The overall dimensions are 14.50 x 3.50 meters, which provides for easy transportation by lorry. Design and texture of the interior design and façade can be determined by the client from various options listed in a design catalogue. This provides for tailor-made design options for the housing units as well as for flexible pricing options. Through modular element construction and the intensive use of wood, the housing units can be completely disassembled thus minimizing their environmental footprint. By combining innovation and mobility at a reasonable price, Casa Invisibile is a product that offers a ground breaking alternative in an increasingly critical housing situation.

This quiet low-rise cul-de-sac of semi detached houses at Jalan Binchang is similar to many in Singapore. Constructed mostly in the 1970’s, the pairs of two storey brick houses are now at the stage in their building lifespan where renovation is eminent. The designers saw the development of the quaint neighborhood and its natural evolution as a main source of inspiration in the design of no. 67 Jalan Binchang. They brainstormed on how to enlarge and rejuvenate the existing semi detached house while maintaining a harmony with the existing built environment, the history of tropical residential buildings and with the natural environment. The designers looked at the existing building as one would study a living organism that needed to adapt to a new environment. Instead of demolishing its embedded history and reinventing it as something completely new, they decided to use its structure, its internal logic of organization and meaning as a starting point to the design, and to build upon this pre-existing pattern and structure to evolve it into a new form and space. The architects find it important to study how space can evolve with time and with the changing conditions of the inhabitants so that the lifespan of construction can be increased. Also as a way of reducing waste, savings cost on the project, and minimizing disruption to the neighbor’s house, the designers decided to retain the entire 2-storey semi detached house on the site. Between this structure and a newly added 2 storey plus attic extension, a gap between the old and new structures was kept to bring light and wind through the house as well as to allow for the settlement of the new structure independently from the old. The internal building’s logic of the front facing public room, rear facing services and private second storey of the existing house was maintained and carried over to the side extension.

This house offers the family a life to live closer to green. Living room is that the sash is completely full open, and has a space to feel the green integrated north garden and south garden. On 2nd floor balcony, planters are placed randomly, which makes a series of green together with green in front and back of the building. These plants help to cool down the temperature , block sunshine and offer privacy for residents. Planted zone with a vertical ties forms a favorable environment for the residential and region.

“dialogue” between the old and the new “substance” This is a house to be built in Tokyo, for a movie producer couple. This architecture is consisted by combining L-shaped blocks of reinforced concrete and sequential frames of box-shaped engineer-wood. We put bedrooms, film archive and galley in solid concrete part for security, and living room in engineer-wood part for openness. As material that consist an open space that is 6m in height, 5.5m in width, 14m in depth, we choose thin engineer-wood (38mmx287mm). Main theme for this architecture is to bring out a sense of mass and material, which were denied by modern architecture which pursued “white, flat wall” as a style. We intentionally left the wood grain of mold on the surface of concrete, and choose textured stones and irons. It goes without saying that a house is a relaxing place. A house like a white-cube, surrounded by flat, white walls everywhere, gives a person very abstract image. But that image could only be sensed when we use intellective part of our brain. The problem is that we’re not all-intellective-creature. For the people like this client, who do enough intellectual labor on a daily basis, white-cube would only bring sense of fatigue. The role of architecture, especially the ones for living, is to soothe the sensory side of people, not to stimulate the intellectual side. That’s my take. Sure, intellectual living would have got some meaning as a fashion at the time when modern architecture was born. However, now that it became a part of everyday life, its identity has been lost. We have to examine whether our approach is rational or not every time we build architecture.